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Spooky WiFi LED Halloween Picture (using ESP8266)

I was inspired to this project by the project "Spooky LED Halloween Sign" by K-Greenhalgh. After reading about this project, I thought "why shouldn't I use the ESP8266 to control the LEDs? I would be able to switch the LEDs on and off by my smartphone!". And I did it, here you can see how:

Step 1: Getting & Preparing a Picture and a Picture Frame

I used a picture frame I found in the basement and a portrait of Georg Simon Ohm, just because he looks so mad. Unfortunately, my picture frame didn't have a fitting glass pane or cardboard, so I had to make one myself. I just cut out a fitting cardboard and decided that I wouldn't need a glass pane.

After that was done, I positioned the picture onto the cardboard and marked the positions of the eyes on the cardboard by measuring the distances to the top and left edge and transferring these measurements to the cardboard. Then, I drilled 5 mm holes into the cardboard for the LEDs to fit in.

In addition, I cut out some of the cardboard to have space for the ESP8266 and its wires and used some tape to fix everything.

Step 2: Mounting and Soldering the Electronics

For this project, I used an ESP8266-01 to control the LEDs via WiFi. I found the ESP8266 was to high to fit into the cardboard, so I desoldered all the headers from the PCB and used wires to re-attatch them further away. As the schematic is quite simple, I just soldered all the parts directly onto the ESP8266 and used shrinking tube and isolating tape to isolate my wires from the PCB.

Note: In the schematic, the ESP-01 is shown in the position with the antenna on the left.

Step 3: The Code

I used the Arduino IDE with the ESP8266 core installed for writing the code. My code is able to connect to a WiFi network and control the LEDs via ArtNet. Furthermore, a own WiFi network is created to control the LEDs with a smartphone via a web interface.